Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to locating a wireless communication device within a wireless network.
Related Art
A cellular network is a wireless network distributed over a geographic area that is divided into cells. Each cell is served by at least one fixed-location transceiver, known as a base station. The base station is responsible for handling traffic and signaling between communication devices and a network switching subsystem. When joined together, the cells provide communications over a wide geographic area. This enables a mobile communication device to communicate with another mobile communication device, with a base station, and/or with another communication device within the cellular network.
The mobile communication device represents a device that can initiate and receive communications over a radio link in accordance with one or more communication standards or protocols while moving around a wide geographic area. The one or more communication standards or protocols can include, for example, various cellular communication standards such as a third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) communications standard, a fourth generation (4G) mobile communications standard, a third generation (3G) mobile communications standard, and/or various networking protocols such an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 communications standard or any other Wi-Fi wireless network communications standard or protocol. For example, in LTE, the mobile communication device over the cellular network by sending and receiving various orthogonal frequency-division multiplexed (OFDM) communication signals. OFDM represents a method of encoding communication signals on multiple carrier frequencies. By using OFDM, a large number of closely spaced orthogonal sub-carrier signals can be used to communicate data on several parallel data streams or channels. This minimizes the cross-talk between the data streams or channels allowing for multiple concurrent transmissions.
Often times, knowing a physical location, or simply a location, of the mobile communication device within the cellular network can be beneficial to a user of the mobile communication device, as well as an operator of the cellular network. This allows the mobile communication device and/or the cellular network to provide location-based services (LBS) to the user. LBS represent various services that are provided to the users that depend upon the physical location of the mobile communication device. These services can include, for example, recommending social events in a city, requesting the nearest business or service such as an automated teller machine (ATM) or restaurant, turn by turn navigation to an address, locating people on a map, location-based mobile advertising, or contextualizing learning and research as well as many other services.
The present disclosure will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements.